24.06.10. Fez, Morocco (Ali & Alice’s house, rooftop)

I.
True it is not the Africa of my dreams; but then, that place does not exist. It is not elsewhere, it is simply absent.

II.
The pigeons are making their guttural sounds; the wind is both strong and soothing, the sunlight casts a golden spell. Soon the sun will drop below the hillside – even now the sky at the horizon has turned pink. Behind me a minaret stands proud. Minarets and satellite dishes characterize the landscape here. I’m always so fascinated by these uncanny juxtapositions, but really they mean very little. This is simply how things are nowadays. There’s wifi in the medina; what of it?

This is a place that is both not-familiar and also very familiar; it moves quickly and slowly at the same time. From here it all looks so simple – I can see the Merinides hotel, the ruins on the ridge, and it hardly looks very far. A crow could be there and back long before the sun disappears. But below is a bowl of complexity; by foot it would take you an hour to find your way through the tangle of streets and shops and dead-end alleyways (“derbs”, I’ve learned they’re called, these exotic culs-de-sac). You would not be there in time for sunset. See? Simple but not simple.

III.
Oh, but it’s as Africa as any other bit of Africa. Its Arab influences do not preclude it from belonging to its own continent.

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26.06.10

Ali tells us of the jinns, the spirits. He does not like the dark because it is infused with them (and we arrive again at light and dark). Alice says he tells her not to go into dark alleyways.

Then she tells us a strange tale of going to see a purging of jinn-infested women. (We are on the rooftop, eating Moroccan style out of a tagine, sipping red wine, the empty bottles of which must be carefully brought out and disposed of one by one, so as not to offend the neighbours in this dry-but-not-dry part of the city). They wore black, Alice tells us. They brought offerings to the river – bread, milk, chickens, a hedgehog.

(A hedgehog? )

Yes, a hedgehog, she says. But the hedgehog was simply flung to the riverbank, while the chickens were beheaded. A man gave the bread to the river and scattered the milk. The women, or some of them, began to convulse and make strange guttural sounds, an indication that they could see the devil.

***

27.06.10

Islam is everywhere and nowhere here. You breathe it in at night; it seeps into your ears with each adhan, and yet it feels such an organic substance, as if were part of the molecules of the air, that it is sometimes easy to forget the foreignness of things.

One of Alice’s friends, a teacher at the school where Alice is studying Arabic, sips mint tea with us one afternoon. She is 25, a student of Tajwīd, recitation of the Qur’an. It is a specific and shockingly intricate art; it takes years to master the correct emphasis and pronunciation. Her love for her religion – not as a religion in the way that we conventionally understand it, but as a topic of study, a thing which lives and breathes itself, a story – is infectious.Really, we decide, our thoughts hazy from the heat (perhaps this is the ideal atmosphere in which to learn – your mind malleable, melting like wax, reforming around each new idea) everything is the same (philosophies, religions); everything is about how we live our lives.

She speaks to us in perfect, almost un-accented English about her own students, some of whom are ambivalent still about having a female tutor.

Strange this balance, I think. How sometimes you find yourself thinking, here: ‘there’s so much!’. And at other times, ‘there’s so little!’ It’s so cramped, so open. So hostile and yet so friendly.

***

28.06.10

Later, at the local hammam, topless, filthy, I sit on the hot tiled floor while another woman, topless too, her hair wrapped in a white scarf to keep it from her face, scrubs me vigorously. We do not speak the same language, but when she wrenches me round so she can scrub my front, and holds my arm up with a smile and a tsk to indicate how much dirt she has brought to the surface, how much dead skin will be washed away with the next bucket of water, we are in the same moment, inhabiting the same world. Maybe later I pass her on the street, and do not know it – she shrouded by a hijab, me pale-skinned and wide-eyed like every other Western tourist, each of us indistinguishable in spite of that moment of intimacy.

But in that moment: how unselfconscious I feel! Usually so aware of things – unsightly folds of skin, the size of my breasts. But the folds are like everyone else’s folds, and my breasts are certainly no larger than most of the other women’s, and the water, the steam, the scrubbing all act as a drug, and an hour and a half slips by unnoticed.

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We have been, we are, travelling. We are in a state of travel. Dispossessed, half-asleep, gripped by other worlds (Moroccan spiced coffee, of which my bag now smells, and the distant Irish troubles of the 1920s, of which I have been reading), totally and utterly outside the moment and space we’re actually in.

We are however capable of looking towards the future: what will we have for dinner? Probably Chinese, or else pizza – and someone will deliver it swiftly and practically wordlessly to our house, and we will not say shokran, nor will the man who delivers our dinner expect anything, or see any disparity (class, colour, religion) between us and him. Our street will seem miraculously wide and the drunks exceptionally loud and we will for awhile miss (or at least unconsciously feel the lack of) the five calls to prayer, particularly the one just before dawn. Perhaps we will wake then, each of us, silently, without even knowing the other, too, is conscious of the quiet hour. We will hear the yelp of bicycle wheels or the moan of an errant car alarm, and then, comforted by this intrusion of noise, we will sleep again, through the dawn, too late, wake bathed in hot light, angry, minds elsewhere.

There is no possibility of jet-lag (no time difference, not that I was ever even vaguely aware of the time as we traipsed through the medina), but we will pretend that we’re travel-weary and in doing so, convince ourselves that we are travel-weary and jet-lagged after all, and people will know how to interpret the haze in our eyes, for we will say, ‘Oh yes, we’ve been in Morocco’. I despair of how that will sound – arrogant, perhaps? Though we hardly mean for it to.

It’s just that the way time moves alarms me. On the way to the airport, we say glibly that it hardly seems a week could possibly have passed since we were on the way to the medina, and I’m reminded of a dream I had shortly before we left, in which we departed and then suddenly I found myself returning, thinking, ‘but that was so quick, and we hardly did anything we said we would!’

Everything, really, is a variation of that dream – how else did I arrive at the age of 23, when just yesterday I was 20, and travelling back from Fés with a newfound lover, making lists in the back of my notebook of the furniture I would have to buy in order to furnish my apartment in Boston when I got back in September; and crying at the ending of John Connolly’s The Book of Lost Things, when really I meant to cry at my predicament, at the seeming impossibility of being parted by an ocean (not to mention a thousand yards of red tape, a thousand pounds, a thousand moments of yearning and wishing and resenting) from my love. Three years ago? No, that was three minutes ago, or else three centuries ago. We live always on dream-time, moving through molasses, or being propelled at the speed of light through our own experiences.

…and here we are now. Replicating the journey physically at least, though now I make no lists, because the house in Oxford is already full of our things (mostly our books), because I have a visa that makes my life there valid. “Oh September, where did you go?” is the refrain of the song I’m listening to, and oh how often I find myself thinking that! Without even knowing which September I mean. Perhaps I mean the first September I ever saw – how would I know? And what difference could it possibly make? It was September and now it is not and soon enough it will be again – this is an inevitable, unvarying truth. Leaves will fall again from the cherry trees in our garden and I will sit mournfully in my study and say, “Oh June, where did you go?” – wondering how the green could fade so fast.

Speaking of which, where did June go? For already it is July and Wimbledon is nearly over and soon our friends’ son will celebrate his first birthday, when this time last year he was only an idea, crouching in his mother’s body, a being who both did and did not exist as we took a break from our investigations into the life and writings of P.G. Wodehouse to eat cold fruit and watch the tennis, while outside on Plantation Road the elderly shuffled past, gasping in the heat, sweat forming in the ravines of their facial wrinkles. September indeed!

(Later I think how funny: for although we’ve been travelling all day, I am now inexplicably, unexpectedly, in England, at home, as if I had been moved like a chess piece from one place to another, as if the time and space between there and here had been erased.)

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